Month: May 2013

Roger Moute a Bidias, younger brother of former UCLA standout and current Milwaukee Bucks player Luc Richard Mbah a Moute, has signed a national letter-of-intent to play next season at Cal. We reported his commitment to the Bears last week.

The 6-foot-7 forward, a consensus three-star prospect, is the fifth member of the Bears’ recruiting class that is headlined by top-20 talent Jabari Bird of Salesian High.

Cal coach Mike Montgomery called Moute a Bidias “an extremely athletic young man with great upside. Roger is a very engaging individual that I think is going to be a tremendous asset to the Cal community.”

A native of Cameroon, Moute a Bidias averaged 10 points and 10 rebounds last season at Notre Dame Prep in Fitchburg, Mass.

A year after earning a No. 1 seed for the NCAA tournament, the Cal softball team (36-17) was placed in a regional at Ann Arbor, Mich., its 28th consecutive trip to the NCAAs — the longest active streak in the country.

The Bears open play Friday against Central Michigan (33-18) at 4:30 p.m. The game will be shown on ESPN3. Also in the Ann Arbor regional are eighth-seeded Michigan (45-10) and Valparaiso (34-25).

The winner of the Michigan regional advances to play a best-of-three series against the winner of the LSU regional, featuring LSU, Central Connecticut, Louisiana-Lafayette and Northwestern State.

Cal is aiming for its third straight College World Series bid.

Eight Pac-12 teams were included in the 64-team NCAA field, topped by conference champion and No. 3 seed Oregon and fifth-seeded Arizona State. ASU opens at home against San Jose State.

Stanford also claimed a spot in the event, and will open against Tulsa at Lincoln, Neb.

Senior Ray Stewart, sidelined all last season by a knee injury, won the 110-meter hurdles at the Pac-12 Track and Field Championships on Sunday at USC.

Stewart, a James Logan HS product, won the title in 2011, then missed the 2012 campaign. He ran a lifetime-best mark of 13.43 seconds on Sunday, to beat defending champ Johnathan Carbral of Oregon.

Stewart remains No. 2 on Cal’s career list, behind only Larry Cowling’s 1982 mark of 13.39. By becoming the first Cal hurdler to win the event twice at the Pac-10 meet, Stewart also moved to No. 10 on the all-time confererence list.

Meanwhile, Hammed Suleman finished second in the triple jump with a wind-aided mark of 50 feet, 6 inches, barely missing a sweep of the long jump/triple jump events.

Charnell Price was third in the 100 meters (11.60), fifth in the 200 (23.55) and helped the Cal women to a fourth-place finish in the 4×100 relay (45.24).

Junior Hammed Suleman leaped 25 feet, 11 1/2 inches on his third attempt to win the long jump at the Pac-12 Conference championships in Los Angeles. He is the first Cal athlete in 17 years to win the event at the league meet.

Suleman, runnerup in the event the past two seasons, moved to No. 4 on Cal’s all-time list in the event. The school record is 26-6 1/4, set by Curtis Rogers in 1985.

Suleman will try to win the triple jump on Sunday. He enters the competition ranked No. 2 among all collegians at 53-4 1/2.

Collin Jarvis, defending champion in the 3,000-meter steeplechase, finished second in a personal-best time of 8:47.82.

Cal’s top finisher in the women’s meet was Malaina Payton, who was third in the long jump at 20-9 1/4.

The day’s highlight was delivered by 2012 Olympian Brigetta Barrett, a senior at Arizona, who was the high jump with an NCAA-rec0rd clearance of 6-6 1/4. She broke the 18-year-old record of 6-6, set by former UCLA star Amy Acuff.

Also scheduled for induction into the 28th class will be track star Rick Brown, softball player Candace Harper, women’s basketball player Trish Stafford-Odom, swimmer Staciana Stitts, and rower and long-time contributor Gary Rogers.

Induction ceremonies are scheduled for Friday, Oct. 18, at the annual Hall of Fame banquet at the Greek Orthodox Church Conference Center in Oakland. Information on tickets to the banquet can be found online at bigcsociety.org.

The new inductees will also be honored at halftime of Cal’s Oct. 19 football game vs. Oregon State at Memorial Stadium.

The No. 1-ranked Cal golf team was selected as the top seed in the 54-hole NCAA Pullman Regionals, May 16-18 in Pullman, Wash.

Cal is among 81 teams competing at six regional tournaments. The Pullman event will feature 14 schools, including No. 2 seed TCU. Also headed to Pullman are Saint Mary’s, Pacific, USC, BYU and San Diego State.

The Bears are playing in an NCAA regional for the seventh consecutive season.

“This is always the fun time of the year,” Cal coach Steve Desimone said. “You start with the conference championship, and we were successful there. As we now get to the NCAA Regional, we’re certainly not going to look past that. It will be very competitive. There are some really good teams in the regional. We’re going to have to be ready, and we’re going to have to play well.”

“We haven’t played the course before, but the one thing I’ve heard is that it’s a good, fair golf course,” Desimone added.

Cal has equaled the unofficial all-time NCAA victory record previously established by Oklahoma State in 1985-86 with victories in 10 of its first 12 tournaments in 2012-13. Most recently, the Bears defended their title at the Pac-12 Championship.

One of the benefits of Cal finishing spring workouts sooner than any other team in the Pac-12 — way back on March 23 — was the opportunity for the coaching staff to focus early on recruiting the high school Class of 2014.

The Bears’ priorities are clear, coach Sonny Dykes said. He wants to sign five defensive backs and two running backs next February.

He identified running back as “a position where guys have a hard time staying healthy through the course of a year. Those guys get beat up. You’ve got to have a good stable of running backs.”

Cal is hot after Joe Mixon, a 6-foot, 195-pound four-star running back from Freedom HS in Oakley. But so is everyone else. Mixon has perhaps three dozen teams pursuing him, including Notre Dame, Michigan, Ohio State, Texas, Florida and most of the Pac-12.

He’d be huge for Dykes and the Bears, but obviously he’s by no means a lock for the home team.

Coach Sonny Dykes said during a Pac-12 coaches teleconference on Monday morning that he has no better idea who his starting quarterback will be than he did a month ago when spring practice ended 44 days ago.

He added that he’d like to have it figured out within 12 to 15 practices after fall camp begins on Aug. 5. In other words, we should know the starting QB in about 100 days.

As of right now, Zack Kline, Jared Goff and Austin Hinder all remain in the mix.

“Had a chance to go back and review everything and really felt similar as we did after wrapping spring ball up,” Dykes said. “We felt like we had three guys that we thought were very different in what they brought to the table, but all three of them were good players, good leaders, were competitive guys we felt like could handle being the starting quarterback at Cal and all the stuff that goes with that.

“We felt similar after going back and looking at tape. Guys traded days, so there were days you’d walk off the field and you’d say, `OK, Zack Kline’s the guy.’ And then the next day, you’d say, `Jared Goff’s the guy,’ and then Austin Hinder would make a run. I don’t think anybody solidified the position during the spring.”

Asked how quickly after fall practice begins he’d like to settle on a starter, Dykes said, “As soon as possible … the best thing would be one of the guys really improves over the summer and takes over the job a week into camp and we just move on from there.

“I think we’re going to need to make a decision by practice 12, practice 15, probably at the latest. We’re hoping somebody is the clear-cut winner.”